Phone system rollout: 7 courses and 7 videos in 10 days

The whole organization was moving from Avaya to Five9 on a fixed date. Every employee had to be ready for it, and I had ten days to build the training on my own.

My role

Sole designer, developer and video producer

Timeline

10 days, concept to launch

Audience

All ~1,600 employees, in two role-based paths

Tools

Articulate Rise, Camtasia

The problem

Every phone in the organization was switching to a new contact center platform on the same day. The whole organization was cutting over together, so the date was fixed. That gave training ten days.

The request started as three videos. Once we looked at who actually takes calls and how, three videos weren’t going to get 1,600 people ready, so it grew into a full learning path in the same ten days.

How I built it

1. Split the audience by how people take calls

   About 600 front-line agents would take calls through the Five9 adapter inside Pega, our CRM. Roughly 1,000 more people in support departments and branches would use Five9’s Desktop Plus. Same phone system, different screens, so I built two paths instead of one generic course.

2. Mapped seven short courses, each paired with a video

   A shared Five9 introduction for everyone, then three courses for each platform: Getting started, Handling calls, and Voicemail. Each course had a matching screen-recorded video, because a phone system is easier to learn by watching the screen than by reading about it. Short courses also meant people could come back to one task later without restarting the path.

3. Worked with two subject matter experts

   Five9 was new to everyone, so the experts were the two managers leading the rollout. Because the system was being configured into our environment as I built, I wrote to how it actually behaved, and sign-off moved quickly.

4. Built in Rise and Camtasia, at full scope

   Rise for the lessons and knowledge checks, Camtasia for the walkthrough videos. Nothing was cut to make the date.

5. Launched, then put people on the real phones

   Every employee was enrolled with a five-day deadline in the LMS. Finishing the path enrolled you in an instructor-led session where you practiced on the live Five9 system before it went live for members. Our facilitators ran those sessions for all 600 Pega agents.

What happened

The path launched on schedule and go-live held its date. Demand outran the LMS: with so many people in the courses at once, it went down several times during the five-day window. We worked with IT to get the servers back up and staggered enrollment so everyone could get through.

The completion reports and manager feedback from that launch didn’t survive our records-retention policy, so I’m not going to quote numbers I can’t show you.

What came next

This was version 1, and it was built to be a working MVP for a system nobody had used yet. Version 2 added supervisor training. Version 3 covered the IVR, as external systems and voice recognition were integrated into it.

What I learned

It’s the project I’m proudest of because it was hand-built, under pressure, on a date that wasn’t going to move. Training for a new, untested system means a lot of trial and error. The goal is a first version that works on day one, then improving it once people are using the real thing.

Internal details and materials are left out. This write-up describes the work; it doesn’t reproduce it.